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How to Use Google Analytics for Social Media

Cody Schneider•

Vanity metrics like likes and shares are easy to track on social media, but they don't tell you what happens after a user clicks your link. To understand the real business impact of your social strategy, you need to follow that journey onto your website. This is where Google Analytics 4 becomes your most powerful tool, helping you connect your social media efforts directly to website traffic, engagement, and conversions like sales or leads.

This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to set up and use GA4 to measure your social media performance. We'll cover everything from tagging your URLs correctly to finding the key reports that reveal which platforms and campaigns are actually driving results for your business.

Why Native Social Analytics Aren't Enough

Every social media platform - from Facebook to TikTok to LinkedIn - offers its own analytics dashboard. These tools are great for understanding performance on the platform itself. They’ll tell you about your post reach, video views, follower growth, and engagement rate.

However, their visibility ends the moment a user leaves their app and lands on your website. They can't tell you:

  • What pages those visitors viewed after landing on your site.

  • How long they stayed or how many pages they looked at.

  • Whether they signed up for your newsletter, downloaded an ebook, or completed a purchase.

  • How your social media visitors compare to visitors from other channels like organic search or email.

Google Analytics bridges this gap. It provides a single source of truth for all your website traffic, allowing you to see the complete user journey and measure the tangible return on investment (ROI) of your social media marketing.

Setting Up GA4 for Social Media Tracking

Before you can dig into the data, you need to lay the proper groundwork. This involves ensuring GA4 gets the right information, which hinges on one critical technique: UTM parameters.

Step 1: Get Familiar with UTM Parameters

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are simple tags you add to the end of your URLs. When someone clicks a UTM-tagged link, those tags are passed to Google Analytics, giving you precise details about where the click came from.

You’ll share hundreds of links on social media, and without UTMs, GA4 might lump much of that traffic into a vague "Direct" or "Referral" bucket. Proper tagging ensures every click is attributed correctly.

There are five main UTM parameters, but for social media, you’ll primarily focus on three:

  • utm_source: This identifies the specific platform, like 'facebook', 'instagram', or 'linkedin'. It answers the question, "Where is the traffic from?"Example: utm_source=facebook

  • utm_medium: This identifies the marketing medium, which for our purposes will generally be 'social'. It answers the question, "How did the traffic get here?"Example: utm_medium=social

  • utm_campaign: This identifies a specific campaign, product launch, or promotion. It helps you group all your related efforts together. It's the most flexible and arguably the most important tag.Example: utm_campaign=summer-sale-2024

Optionally, you can use these for even more detail:

  • utm_content: This distinguishes between different ads or links that point to the same URL. For example, did the user click the link in your Instagram Story or the one in your bio?Example: utm_content=story-link vs. utm_content=bio-link

  • utm_term: This is mainly used for paid search to identify keywords, so you’ll rarely use it for organic social media tracking.

How to Build a UTM-Tagged URL

Manually typing these out is prone to errors. Instead, use Google's Campaign URL Builder. You just enter your website URL and fill in the parameter fields, and it generates the final link for you.

Let’s say you’re promoting a new blog post on Facebook as part of your "Summer Content" campaign. Here's how you’d fill out the builder:

  • Website URL: https://www.yourwebsite.com/new-blog-post

  • Campaign Source: facebook

  • Campaign Medium: social

  • Campaign Name: summer_content_push

The tool would generate this URL to share on Facebook: https://www.yourwebsite.com/new-blog-post?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=summer_content_push

Now, when someone clicks this link, GA4 will know they came from Facebook as part of your summer content campaign.

Step 2: Define Your Goals with Conversions

Knowing where traffic comes from is just step one. The next is to track whether that traffic is doing what you want it to. In GA4, these important actions are called Conversions.

First, think about the most valuable actions a user can take on your website that originate from social media. Common examples include:

  • Signing up for your email newsletter (generate_lead)

  • Filling out a contact form (generate_lead)

  • Downloading a PDF guide or case study (file_download)

  • Making a purchase (purchase)

  • Starting a free trial (begin_checkout or a custom event)

GA4 automatically tracks several events. To find them, navigate to Admin > Data display > Events in your GA4 property. Here, you'll see a list of every event being collected. To turn any of these into a conversion, simply toggle the switch under the "Mark as conversion" column.

For example, if you set up an event named newsletter_signup for when a user subscribes, you’d find that event in the list and mark it as a conversion. Now, you can measure exactly how many newsletter signups each social media channel drives.

Finding Social Media Insights in GA4 Reports

With correct tagging and conversion tracking in place, you’re ready to analyze your performance. GA4 offers several key reports for this purpose.

1. Traffic Acquisition Report

This is your home base for understanding where your traffic is coming from. It tells you which channels are driving the most users, engagement, and conversions.

How to find it: In the left-hand navigation, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

The default view shows a table with a column called Session default channel group. This automatically groups your traffic into channels like 'Organic Search', 'Direct', 'Referral', 'Organic Social', and 'Paid Social'. This is the first place to look for a high-level overview of your social performance.

For a more detailed breakdown:

  • Click the primary dimension dropdown (default is Session default channel group) and change it to Session source / medium. This will show you exactly which platforms (e.g., facebook / social, linkedin / social) are sending traffic.

  • To see campaign performance, click the small "+" icon next to the primary dimension column and add a secondary dimension. Choose Traffic source > Session campaign. Now you can see performance broken down by each of your campaigns.

Focus on these key metrics:

  • Users & Sessions: How many people and visits is each social channel sending?

  • Engaged sessions & Engagement rate: What percentage of those visits are actually engaging with your content? An engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews.

  • Conversions: Which channels and campaigns are driving the most valuable actions (purchases, leads, signups)?

2. Landing Page Report

This report shows you which pages on your site receive the most traffic from social media. It helps you understand what content resonates with your social audience and whether those landing pages are effective at keeping users on your site.

How to find it: Navigate to Reports > Engagement > Landing page.

By default, this report shows data for all traffic sources. To isolate your social traffic, you need to apply a filter:

  1. At the top of the report, click "Add filter."

  2. Set the dimension to Session default channel group.

  3. Set the match type to "exactly matches."

  4. Set the value to Organic Social. Click Apply. You can create another filter for Paid Social too.

Now, the report will only show landing pages that visitors arrived at from social media. Check the Engagement rate and Conversions for each landing page. If a popular landing page has a very low engagement rate, it might be a sign that the page content isn't a good match for what your social post promised.

3. Funnel Exploration (Advanced)

This powerful custom report lets you visualize the steps users take to complete a key journey on your website and shows you where they drop off.

How to find it: Go to the Explore section in the left navigation and create a new "Funnel exploration" report.

Let's say you want to track how many social media users from your summer sale campaign completed a purchase. Your funnel might look like this:

  1. Step 1: Event = view_item (User views a product)

  2. Step 2: Event = add_to_cart (User adds the item to their cart)

  3. Step 3: Event = begin_checkout (User starts the checkout process)

  4. Step 4: Event = purchase (User completes the purchase)

After defining the steps, you can apply a segment to only include users from your social campaign. Under the Segments section of the setup panel, create a new User segment where the Session campaign exactly matches 'summer-sale-2024'.

This will show you exactly what percentage of users from that massive social push actually made it through your entire purchase funnel. You can identify which step has the biggest drop-off and work to optimize that part of the process.

From Data to Smarter Social Strategy

Gathering data is pointless without acting on it. Here’s how to translate your GA4 findings into real strategy shifts:

  • Double Down on What Works: Does LinkedIn drive tons of engaged B2B leads while your Facebook efforts fall flat? Reallocate your time and budget to the platforms proving their value.

  • Optimize Your Ad Spend: By adding Session campaign as a secondary dimension to your Traffic Acquisition report, you can directly tie ad spend to revenue. If one Facebook ad campaign has a higher conversion rate than another, you know where to invest more heavily.

  • Refine Your Content Strategy: Is a blog post about "Financial Tips for Freelancers" bringing in high-quality traffic from LinkedIn? That’s a signal to create more content around that theme for that specific audience.

  • Improve Your User Experience: If the Landing Page report shows that visitors from your Instagram bio link have a very high bounce rate, consider if that page is mobile-friendly and delivers what they were expecting to see.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics helps you move beyond superficial social media metrics and truly understand how your content impacts your business. By thoughtfully tagging your links, setting up conversions, and regularly checking key reports, you can get concrete data to inform your strategy, justify your budget, and prove the ROI of your social media efforts.

While GA4 provides all the necessary detail, jumping between platforms and piecing together reports to get a full picture can still be a manual chore. At our company, we built Graphed to solve this problem by connecting directly to your Google Analytics, marketing platforms, and sales tools in one place. You can use simple natural language prompts like "Show me a dashboard of my conversions from all organic social channels last month" and instantly get the visualized data, without ever navigating through complex GA4 menus or exporting CSVs.